Never Trust a Do-Gooder (or How I Lost Faith in Utopia)

Summerhill School, England

In the mid-1960s, there were thousands of kids like me who weren’t quite fitting in. We became noticeable right away when we stopped cutting our hair. In the mid-Sixties males were expected to sport looks straight out of Marine Corps boot camp, so bangs or even ducktails were radical, much less hair over the ears. We skipped school often as possible and got into trouble due to our bad attitude concerning authority. But there was a mecca beckoning to us from across the sea, a heaven-on-earth called Summerhill, a boarding school in England with no grades, no bells, and no rules, run by students, who were allowed to do whatever they pleased all day long. Founded by a psychologist in 1921, the school proved children flourish when provided with tools and access to educational materials, and they learn faster on their own when immersed in subjects over long periods. Today, I realize Summerhill isn’t that far off from home schooling, although in the Sixties few realized home schooling was an option. In case you didn’t know, it’s been proven home schooling works better than traditional schooling.

Suddenly, hundreds of attempts at Summerhill “freedom” schools were launched, some of which survive to this day. Our established school methodology of constantly ringing bells and rotating subjects on the hour seems to have been devised in Germany for the purpose of conditioning youth to happily accept a meager factory environment and always obey authority for the remainder of their lives. Strangely, it seems possible some Summerhill experiments could have been experiments in mind control, which would be the exact opposite of what A.S. Neill had intended.

Bill Ayers was a rich kid in Chicago who attended the Lake Forest Academy before graduating from the University of Michigan in 1968. He joined the SDS in college and upon graduation went straight to The Children’s Community, a recently-created Summerhill-type school in Ann Arbor. Almost immediately, he was named director of this school. His girlfriend Diana Oughton worked there too. She was from an even more privileged upbringing than Ayers, and his upbringing was pretty swank. She’d recently spent a summer in Germany, where she was apparently “radicalized.”

These two swiftly become the leaders of the violent Weather Underground, which has all the markings of a counterintelligence operation designed to destroy the student youth movement by driving it toward violence. And that wasn’t easy to do since the student youth movement was almost universally non-violent at the time. By the late 1960s, this movement had become centered on stopping the war in Vietnam, but it had begun by supporting the Civil Rights movement and the growing realization among the young that racism was a serious problem being overlooked. The freedom school movement of the 1960s was the first large-scale attempt to integrate schools, so the most intense opposition came from racists.

Soon, however, Oughton would blow herself up while fashioning a bomb intended to be set-off at Fort Dix, a shrapnel device designed to murder dozens of cadets and their dates at a social dance. This unplanned explosion in a ritzy Greenwich Village townhouse was the only surfacing of the Weather Underground since they had declared war against America and gone underground. Suppose a group of students today announced war on the United States and started murdering innocent people? How much support would they achieve? Somehow these rich kids from privileged backgrounds joined forces with America’s known enemies in anticipation of a coming Communist revolution they claimed would leave millions murdered or put inside Stalinist concentration camps. It would have been laughable had they not been able to supply so much C4 and automatic weapons to so many psychopaths, or had they not garnered dozens of mind controlled robots, all of whom were gradually reprogrammed during LSD-fueled sex orgies, or had they not generated so many contributions from within the National Lawyers Guild.

What I find interesting is the CIA and FBI were terrified of a rise of a black messiah capable of uniting the Civil Rights and student youth movements. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were both obviously assassinated for this reason, and in the wake of those assassinations, an activist named Fred Hampton emerged in Chicago, someone who created the phrase “rainbow coalition.”

Pretty soon, however, Hampton was assassinated while sleeping in bed, and the next morning Bernadette Dohrn gave press tours of the killing zone while deploying the event as her fulcrum to drive the SDS toward violence as the logical response. Her instant appearance on the scene and manipulation of information that day should be viewed as a possible counterintelligence psyop anointing Dorhn as Hampton’s successor, much the same way Jesse Jackson was anointed immediately after the murder of King.

Dohrn was soon portraying psychopath Charlie Manson as her culture hero, while Ayers was doing the same thing for Sirhan Sirhan. It should be noted Dohrn attended the prestigious University of Chicago and became the first student organizer for the spook-infested National Lawyers Guild.

After Oughton’s death, Ayers and Dorhn became the ruling couple inside the Weather Underground, and they remained in hiding for decades, living in beachfront homes under fake IDs. But after Watergate, when Cointelpro’s illegal activities were unveiled, all records of the Weather Underground’s devious alliances with America’s enemies were suddenly scrubbed from all FBI offices, while Ayers and Dorhn moved swiftly into tenured positions at major universities.

Since every counterculture-leaning grad student with long hair was sacked during the Sixties, it’s hard to fathom how our highly conservative education system would give high-paying salaries and pensions to two admitted terrorists who’d been responsible for hundreds of bombings and numerous deaths, several of which involved law enforcement officers. Unless, of course, Ayers and Dohrn were spooks all along, which seems the most logical explanation.

There’s another thread to this story that involves the history of freedom schools in America, as well as my old friend Don Henderson, who was sent to one of the earliest freedom schools in Florida, a school located through Paul Krassner’s Realist magazine.

Paul and Rev. George

“Did you know about Rev. George Von Hilsheimer’s background in military intelligence when you met him?” I asked Paul recently.

“No,” was the terse reply. “I remember I did fund his operations for a while though.”

Shortly after the Realist transformed Krassner into an important influencer and surveyer of the emerging zeitgeist, Krassner was visited by an energetic fellow with aspirations of becoming an influencer for the counterculture generation himself. He’d already established himself as minister in a religion of his own devising when he came up with the idea of establishing an American version of Summerhill and enlisted Krassner’s support.

Interestingly, if you believe what you read on the Internet, Hilsheimer had previously been posted to military intelligence in Berlin. Krassner had recently begun acting as a referral service for women seeking doctors willing to give abortions, so spooks and subpoenas were raining down on him.

Hilsheimer convinced Krassner to fund the school to the tune of around $50 a month, and deployed the magazine to recruit students and staff. His first attempt (Camp Summerlane, Rosman, North Carolina) ended with the entire camp fleeing in terror from gunshots and explosions instigated by the local townspeople, who’d been enraged by rumors of nude swimming in the lake. Or maybe it was the inclusion of one girl who was half-black on the student roster. The town attack took place on July 11, 1963.

There were a few schools through the decades, up and down the East Coast, but in 1973, Hilsheimer was arrested by Volusia County deputy sheriffs and charged with practicing medicine without a license at his Green Valley School for emotionally disturbed children in Orange City, Florida. The charges were dropped after a raid of the property was deemed improper by the state attorney’s office. So Hilsheimer skipped (just like Ayers and Dohrn).

Meanwhile, kids from the school have come forth over the years with tales of hypnosis, forced injections, electroshock, psychic dreaming, sex with adults, rampant drug use and other weirdness…

“The place was supposed to be a school for troubled kids but it was really a dumping ground for kids who were too much trouble to their parents. The place was crazy – drugs, prostitution, spaced-out “teachers” that had sex with some of the kids and / or supplied them with dope – something out of a nightmare. For me, the problem is that there are folk who think Green Valley was some sort of countercultural utopia. Either nobody knew, or they’re not willing to acknowledge, what an insane place it was.” Former student commenting online

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11 Replies to “Never Trust a Do-Gooder (or How I Lost Faith in Utopia)”

I read a book about “Summerhill” years ago. I had not heard that there may have been mind control experiments there. In the book, “A Terrible Mistake”, by H. P. Albarelli, Jr., one of the incidents explained in detail is the situation in Pont-Saint-Espirit, France, in 1951 when the CIA spiked their water supply with LSD. This is a documented case. Albarelli obtained CIA documents through FOIA, yet people still want to deny the reality of MKULTRA, etc. The only thing that is unclear to me is how many of these “alternative” movements were deliberately and consciously sidetracked or destroyed by the CIA and how many of them declined merely as a side effect of the viral aftermath of the popular culture in general being hijacked. Either way, people who are aware of the giant deception of the Matrix/media complex are being diverted left and right into little rabbit holes of energy-sucking pursuits.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7415082/French-bread-spiked-with-LSD-in-CIA-experiment.html

Summerhill still exists in England. It never had the dark reputation of Hilsheimer’s imitations. Truth is that the CIA places spooks into roles and sometimes the spooks don’t even know who they really work for. I’m good friends with Hank, and broke the story of his book release while I was at High Times.

Not really. There were dozens of mind control ops launched during or soon after the sixties. I would imagine most if not all were launched to study mind control techniques. Some, like the Process Church of Final Judgment and the Weather Underground used orgies on LSD as a programming tool.

Fascinating stuff Steven. I never knew any of it. I saw Dohrn speak at People’s Park one time. We had spent all day riding around on a flatbed truck, then would stop and get out with pick-axes and dig a round hole in the middle of the street, and plant a tree. Pretty stupid stuff, I guess. But who knew?

very interesting. i learned mostly at home though i went to a “good school” in urbana,since ill. was in the top 2 states doe high school education,at the time. i got a’s in classes i liked and flunked the ones i didn’t. all for home schools. we were all reading before the 1st grade and when they produced a “workbook ” to be filled in once per day,for the school year. i always filled out all the pages in mine on the first day of school. how boring ! all stuff i had already learned at home.

From a comment on a Godlike Productions thread about accelerated learning in Calif. schools, with my analysis at bottom:
i’m posting this on a hijacked wireless while wardriving in a nearby town. don’t bother looking because the trail will turn up blank.
lets just say i found this back in an age when computer security wasn’t what it should have been and a kid looking for answers could get into alot of trouble with a 1200bps modem and a little knowledge of VAX.
————
SUBJECT: Project SWEEP
Overview
The TSS project SWEEP is being formed 21 March 1972 by order of the Director as a continuation of the successful research conducted under MKSEARCH, Subproject 47. The unexpected generational effects of heightened mentation in offspring of MKSEARCH-47 subjects will be the focus of this study.
1. This multiphase project will consist of the following:
a. Identification of children aged nine to eleven within the United States public school systems who display the characteristics mentioned in Attachment C, utilizing the various methods outlined therein.
b. Analysis of identified subjects via neurological, biochemical, and psychological means. These analyses will be conducted both by qualified agents and contractors from USEL and GKRI. Use of USEL personnel will be for biochemical operations only and will need to be cleared through TOP SECRET.
c. Promotion of subjects ranking ninety-ninth percentile or higher to Project CORDON.
2. The estimated budget of the project is $45,000,000.00, although the cost could rise sharply due to a 15 year program length. A detailed budgetary analysis is included in Attachment A.
3. Included in Attachment B of this memorandum is a detailed overview of methods and requirements for approval.
Quoting: Iwas1too 865453
Now, either this is some well researched fiction, or it is real. I started to google some of the terms and the further I dug, the more puzzling this post became.
>> VAX were powerful computer systems used in the mid 70’s to mid 80’s by many large businesses and the government. 1200bps modems wouldn’t be available to a “kid” until the early 80s.
>> MKULTRA had been renamed MKSEARCH by the date of this so-called “overview.” Very little seems to be known about subproject 47 on the internet except the association with “Pfeiffer Atlanta/Bordertown.” What the hell is this?
>> If you look at some of the CIA memos that have been released from FOIA MKUltra documents, many of them have a coversheet overview with language almost exactly like is used in this post.
>> “..heightened mentation in offspring of MKSEARCH-47 subjects..” MKULTRA started in the 50’s, and this SWEEP starts in the 70s.. looking for 10 yr olds. So that puts the parents giving birth in the early 60s? Is that when subproject 47 was going on? Did it continue for awhile and produce 15 years worth of kids?
>> This project SWEEP would have run from ’72 to ’87. When did MGM/TAG/GT etc really start nationwide?
>> TSS is how the CIA referred to their technical services division internally in the early 70s. They had also dropped “MK” from new project names by then. This is something you’d only know if you had researched MKULTRA and the history of the CIA. The writer of the post fits these terms in perfectly with the claimed date.
>> I could not find anything about GKRI or USEL. I guess those are cia codenames for businesses, other agencies or something? USEL seems to be related to biochemistry so the only thing that came to mind was U.S. Eli Lily company.. GKRI i’m clueless.
>> Project CORDON? I could find nothing on the internet.. cordon is french for ribbon. Also to cordon something is to block off, isolate with a line of troops.
Very puzzling stuff here. Could be a hoax, but if it is there was some real research put into it. And if so, why so much trouble for a hoax?
Otherwise this is a previously unknown document implying these programs continued AFTER the Kennedy Senate hearings in mid-70s.